How to read smarter: the 90-10 rule

A friend of mine linked to an article by Peter Bregman in the Harvard Business Review recently about how to read more and faster. At least a book a week, the article says. There a fair amount of useful stuff in there. But I think it’s missing something – partly because of the premise of the article, “How to read more“. It seems to me that this is missing the point.

Over the years, I’ve noticed what I now call The 90-10 Rule. It’s simple. Roughly speaking, around 10% of the books I pick up give me around 90% of the benefit of all the books I read. Most books are simply not very good, or they might be good for someone else but not particularly good for me (too hard, too simple, too technical, not about something I’m interested in, etc).If you stop to think about it, I bet the same is true for you, too.

The key issue with reading, therefore, is not to read more books. It’s to work out what those 10% of books are, and to spend your valuable time on them, and (with a few necessary exceptions) them alone.

This means that when you first get to a new book, one of the first tasks is to work out whether you’re even going to bother spending more than a few minutes with it. That’s where the tips in the HBR article are very useful. But the best thing to do with a book that doesn’t grab you is to stop reading it altogether and spend your time doing something more productive.

So, for example, in the last year, I’ve been blown away by Richard Hays, Reading Backwards; James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom; Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death; and a couple of others. The year before, the list included Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos and Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow. A few years ago, it was Tom Weinandy, Does God Suffer; and a couple of years before that it was Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle. Alongside these, there are some old favourites that I go back to frequently, like Calvin’s Institutes and Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics.

I’ve read each of these several times, trying to soak them up, inhabit their world, take them on board, be really changed by them. And with each of them there has been a wonderful moment in the first few minutes of reading it when I’ve suddenly realised, I’ve got one! I’ve found one of the 10%!

I don’t think reading more books should really be the aim of the exercise. Reading more good books is the key – along with having the courage to put the bad ones down.